Leonardo Da Vinci
The ability to make connections across discipline – arts and sciences, humanities and technology – is a key to innovation, imagination and genius.
Jobs said that Leonardo was his hero, since he could saw a beauty in both art and engineering and that his ability to combine them was what made him genius.
I can also paint
There are three major early account of Leonardo by writers who were almost contemporaries. Giorgo Vasari, Anonimo Gaddiano and Gian Paolo Lomazzo.
Childhood, Vinci, 1452-64
Leonardo was born out of relationship between local peasant girl and Piero. With his father living mainly in Florence and his mother nurturing a growing family of her own, Leonardo by age five was primarily living in the da Vinci family home with his leisure-loving grandfather Antonio and his wife.
Leonardo was mainly self-taught. Freethinking attitude saved him from being an acolyte of traditional thinking.
It was a good time for a child with such ambitions and talents to be born. In 1452 Gutenberg has just opened his publishing house. Books were printed that would empower unschooled but brilliant people like Leonardo. Italy was beginning a rare fort-year period during which it was not wracked by wars among its city-states. The Ottoman Turks were about to capture Constantinople, unleashing on Italy a migration of fleeing scholars with bundles of manuscripts containing the ancient wisdom of Euclid, Ptolemy, Plato and Aristotle.
Apprentice
In 1964 his father brought him to Florence. There was no place then, and few places ever, that offered more stimulating environment for creativity than Florence in the 1400s.
Unlike some city-states elsewhere in Italy, Florence was not ruled by hereditary royalty. The Palazzo della Signoria, now known as the Palazzo Vecchio. The republic was not, however, democratic or egalitarian. In fact, it was barely a republic. Exercising power from behind its façade was the Medici family. After Cosimo de’Medici took over the family bank in the 1430s, it became the largest in Europe.
Leonardo was living in Florence in times of Lorenzo de’Medici, Cosimo’s grandson. He was more a poet and patron than he was a banker.
Throw polymaths had a formative influence on Leonardo. Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472).
A left-hander, Leonardo wrote from right to left on a page. Being left-hander also influenced his drawing.
Leonardo became apprentice at Andrea del Verrochio. Leonardo had studied the use of math for commercial purposes at his abacus school, but from Verrochio he learned something more profound: the beauty of geometry.
Leonardo was combining fantasy with observation.
Chiaroscuro, from the Italian for “light/dark” is the use of contrast of light and shadow as a modeling technique for achieving the illusion of plasticity and three-dimensional volume in a two-dimensional drawing or painting.
Some of the flying contraptions that we find in Leonardo’s notebooks were probably for the amusement of theatrical audiences. Leonardo worked in theater. Some of Leonardo’s flying machines were clearly aimed at real human flight.
Other artists had drawn landscapes as backdrops, but Leonardo was something different: depicting nature for its own sake. That makes his Arno Valley drawing a contender for the first such landscape in European art.
The culmination of Leonardo’s collaborations with Verrochio came in the mid-1470s with the completion of the Baptism of Christ.
Leonardo was delighted with nature’s spirals. Leonardo was also experimenting with the trick known as anamorphosis, in which some elements of a work may look distorted when viewed straight on but appear accurate when viewed from another angle.
Leonardo’s first nonreligious painting is the portrait of a melancholy young woman Ginevra de’Benci. The picture presages the Mona Lisa.
On his own – l’amore masculino
In April 1476, a week before his twenty-fourth birthday, Leonardo was accused of engaging in sodomy with a male prostitute. The case was dismissed. Leonardo was romantically and sexually attracted to men and, unlike Michelangelo, seemed to be just fine with that. Leonardo was never known to have had a relationship with a woman.
Leonardo’s most serious longtime companion, who joined Leonardo’s household in 1490, was angelic looking but devilish in personality, and thus acquired the nickname Salai, the Little Devil.
Leonardo opened a workshop of his own in 1477. Commercially, it was a failure.
Leonardo wrote that a good painter should decide broadly upon the position of the limbs and attend first to the movement appropriate to the mental attitudes of the creatures in the narrative.
Unlike any other artist, Leonardo could not ignore an optical problem.
At this time, Leonardo didn’t finish some of his work. He preferred the conception to the execution.
All of Leonardo’s paintings are psychological, and all give vent to his desire to portray emotions. He sought to portray not only moti corporali, the motions of the body, but also how they related to what he called “atti e moti mentali,” the attitudes and motions of the mind. He was a master at connecting the two.
Milan
In 1482, the year he turned thirty, Leonardo da Vinci left Florence for Milan, where he would end up spending the next seventeen years. Milan’s castle provided a perfect environment for Leonardo, who had a fondness for strong leaders, loved the diversity of talent they attracted, and aspired to be on a comfortable retainer. When Leonardo arrived, Milan was ruled by Ludovico Sforza.
Milan was filled with scholars and intellectuals in a wide variety of fields, partly due to the esteemed university in nearby Pavia, which was officially founded in 1361 but had roots stretching back to 825.
Leonardo sends to Sforza a letter with his ideas about some weapons. But at this moment they were more concepts and sketches. He borrowed some concepts from Roger Bacon. He also studied Roberto Valturio’s On the Military Arts.
Leonardo was a pioneer in propounding laws of proportions.
Leonardo would not be involved in military activity until 1502, when he went to work for a more difficult and tyrannical strongman Cesare Borgia.
Leonardo’s Notebooks
Leonardo was keeping records.
A fundamental theme in Leonardo’s art and science was: the interconnectedness of nature, the unity of its patterns, and the analogy between the workings of the human body and those of the earth.
Court Entertainer
Leonardo da Vinci’s entrée into the court of Ludovico Sforza came not as an architect or engineer but as a producer of pageants. He was good with flaying machines. He also produced some musical inventions. He came up with innovative ways to control the vibrations, and thus the pitch and tones, produced by bells, drums, or strings.
Leonardo’s notebooks also contain drafts of fantasy novellas, sometimes in the form of letters describing mysterious lands and adventures.
Personal life
Leonardo became known in Milan not only for these talents but also for his good looks, muscular bild, and gentle personal style. Because of his love for animals, Leonardo was a vegetarian for much of his life.
Even before Salai moved in with him, Leonardo began what would be a lifelong pattern of juxtaposing sketches of an androgynous, curly-haired pretty boy facing a craggy older man like the one on the “theme sheet,” with a jutting chin and aquiline nose.
Vitruvian Man
When Milan’s authorities in 1487 were seeking ideas for building a lantern tower, known as a tiburio, atop their cathedral. Leonardo seized the opportunity to establish his credentials as an architect.
Leonardo worked with Donato Brammate and Francesco di Giorgio. Brammate painted a fresco that featured two ancient philosophers, Heraclitus and Democritus.
In the thousands volume Visconti library in the castle of Pavia there was a beautiful manuscript copy of an architectural treatise by Vitruviues, a Roman military officer and engineer from the first century BC.
What made Vitruvius’s work appealing to Leonardo and Francesco was the relationship between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the earth. The design of a temple depends on symmetry. There must be a precise relation between its components, as in the case of those of a well-shaped man. Vitruvius description of details of proportion: the length of the foot is one sixth of the height of the body; of the forearm, one fourth; and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth. Per Vitruvius’s description, the man’s navel is in the precise center of the circle and his genitals are at the center of the square.
Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man embodies a moment when art and science combined to allow mortal minds to probe timeless questions about who we are and how we fit into the grand order of the universe.
The Horse Monument
Il Cavalo. Leonardo was focused on the horse not on a rider – Duke Francesco. Leonardo got so deeply immersed in these studies that he decided to begin an entire treatise on the anatomy of horses. He could not finish the project since the money went to defense. In 1494 the troops of the French king Charles VIII swept through Italy.
Scientist
Leonardo liked to boast that, because he was not formally educated, he had to learn from his own experiences instead. In that regard, Leonardo was born at a fortunate moment. In 1452 Johannes Gutenberg began selling Bibles from his new printing press.
Leonardo preferred to induce from experiments rather than deduce from theoretical principles.
Leonardo approach to science was observation, discerning patterns and then testing through more observation and experiments.
Leonardo became one of the major Western thinkers, more than a century before Galileo, to pursue in a persistent hands-on fashion the dialogue between experiment and theory that would lead to the modern Scientific Revolution.
Leonardo was good at making analogies.
Leonardo’s skill at observing motion was translated by the flicks of his brush into his art.
Birds and Flight
For more than two decades, beginning around 1490, Leonardo investigated, with an unusual degree of diligence, the flight of birds and the possibility of designing machines that would enable humans to fly.
No scientist before Leonardo had methodically show how birds stay aloft. He realized that the pressure the bird puts on the air is met by an equal and opposite pressure that the air puts on the air.
He had an intimation of what became known, more than two hundred years later, as Bernoulli’s principle: when air (or any fluid) flows faster, it exerts less pressure.
He also pioneered the use of vector-like lines and swirls to show invisible currents.
The Mechanical Arts
Leonardo’s interest in machinery was linked to his fascination with motion. To capture human energy most efficiently, he broke the human body into components; he illustrated how each muscle works, calculated its power, and showed methods for leveraging it.
Leonardo understood the concept of what he called impetus.
Through his work on machinery, Leonardo developed a mechanistic view of the world foreshadowing that of Newton.
Math
Leonardo increasingly came to realize that mathematics was the key to turning observation into theories.
One of Leonardo’s close friends at Milan’s court was Luca Pacioli, a mathematician who developed the first widely published system for double-entry bookkeeping. Pacioli’s book focused on the golden ratio, or divine proportion. It is approximately 1.61. It was written by Euclid around 300 BC.
The Nature of Man
As a young painter in Florence, Leonardo studied human anatomy primarily to improve his arts. When he moved to Milan, he discovered that the study of anatomy was pursued primarily by medical scholars rather than by artists.
Leonardo’s initial anatomy studies in 1489 focused on human skulls.
Leonardo was not content merely to measure every aspect of every body part. In addition, he felt compelled to record what occurs when each of these parts moves.
Virgin of the Rocks
Leonardo was a master of storytelling and conveying a sense of dramatic motion, and like many of his paintings, beginning with the Adoration of the Magi, the Virgin of the Rocks is a narrative.
In Florence, Leonardo had edged away from using mainly tempera paints and had begun to rely more on oils, as had become the practice in the Netherlands, and in Milan he perfected his use of that medium.
The angel in Virgins of the Rocks is an example of Leonardo’s proclivity for gender fluidity.
The Milan Portraits
Painted in oil on a walnut panel, the portrait of Cecila, now known as Lady with an Ermine, was so innovative, so emotionally charged and alive, that it helped to transform the art of portraiture.
Leonardo’s experimentation with light and shadow is seen in another portrait from this period of a woman in the Sforza court, known as La Belle Ferronniere.
The Science of Art
Type of staged debate on the comparative value of various intellectual endeavors, ranging from math to philosophy to art, was a staple of evenings at the Sforza Castle. Known as a paragone, from the Italian word for “comparison”. Leonardo’s paragone presentation was so impressive that, according to his early biographer Lomazzo, the Duke of Milan suggested he write it as a treatise.
Leonardo had a combationary creativity.
Leonardo’s reliance on shadows, rather that contour lines, to define the shape of most objects stemmed from a radical insight, one that he derived from both observation and mathematics: there was no such thing in nature as a precisely visible outline or border to an object.
He also studied optics. He had studied a device known as a camera obscura.
The Last Supper
By conveying ripples of motions and emotions, Leonardo was able not merely to capture a moment but to stage a drama, as if he were choreographing a theatrical performance. The Last Supper’s artificial staging, exaggerated movements, tricks and perspective, and theatricality of hand gestures demonstrate the influence of Leonardo’s work as a court impresario and producer.
The twelve apostles are clustered into groups of three. On the far left is the cluster of Bartholomew, James the Minor and Andrew. The second trio from the left is Judas, Peter and John. The trio to the right of Jesus includes Thomas, James the Great and Philip. The final trio on the right comprises Matthew, Thaddeus and Simon.
Leonardo determined that a proper vantage point for a large picture should be ten to twenty times its width or height.
The Last Supper, both in its creation and in its current state, become not just an example of Leonardo’s genius but also a metaphor for it. The conception was brilliant but the execution flawed.
Personal Turmoil
His life became unsettled in the late 1490s, after Catherina’s death and the completion of The Last Supper. Large forces intervened to rescue Leonardo from his employment concerns. In the summer of 1499, an invasion force sent from French king, Louis XII, was bearing down on Milan. The French were, it turned out, protective of Leonardo.
Florence again
Leonardo’s first stop on his journey back to Florence in early 1500 was the town of Mantua. He settled in Florence from 1500 to 1506. He was spending a lot on books. His inventory in 1504 was 116 volumes.
Because it was delivered to the French court and extensively copied, Madonna of the Yarnwinder turned out to be one of Leonardo’s most influential paintings.
Saint Anne
In 1503 Leonardo had started painting the Mona Lisa, and he had already begun work on the Saint Anne painting.
The Saint Anne is the most complex and layered of Leonardo’s panel paintings.
Paintings Lost and Found
Leonardo is not Titian. He never painted romance or eros.
Cesare Borgia
Cesare Borgia was the son of the Spanish-Italian cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, soon to become Pope Alexander VI.
Borgia attacked Florence in 1502. Franceso Soderini and Niccolo Machiavelli negotiated with him. A few days later, probably as part of his arrangement with Florence that Machiavelli had helped to negotiate, Borgia secured the services of the city’s most famous artist and engineer, Leonardo.
For three months during the winter of 1502-3, three of the most fascinating figures of the Renaissance – a brutal and power-crazed son of a pope, a sly and amoral writer-diplomat, and a dazzling painter yearning to be an engineer – were holed up in a tiny fortified walled town that was approximately five blocks wide and eight blocks long.
Leonardo had a chance to live out his military fantasies, which he did until he realized they could become nightmares.
Hydraulic Engineer
Florence was always in a mixed relationship with Pisa, just over fifty miles down the Arno River. Leonardo and Machiavelli advocated idea to divert The Arno River from its course and taking it away from Pisa. The idea failed. But Leonardo was still interested in idea of canals, one of them being between Florence and the Sea.
Michelangelo and the Lost Battles
The commission that Leonardo received in October 1503 to paint a sprawling battle scene for Florence’s Council Hall in the Palazzo dela Signoria could have become one of the most important of his life. But as with many of his project, Leonardo ended up not finishing the Battle of Anghiari.
In trying to complete this painting and make it stick to the wall that summer in 1505, preparing to paint a competing mural in the room was the rising star of Florence’s art world, Michelangelo Buonarroti.
During the seventeen years that Leonardo was away in Milan, Michelangelo became Florence’s hot new artist.
Leonardo rarely criticized other painters, but after seeing Michelangelo’s bathing nudes he repeatedly disparaged what he called the »anatomical painter«. Therein lay another difference between the two artists. Michelangelo tended to specialize in muscular male nudes.
To define objects, Michelangelo used lines rather than following Leonardo’s practice of using shadows.
At the end the painting was finished by Vasari.
Return to Milan
While in Milan in 1507, Leonardo met the fourteen-year-old named Franceso Melzi. For the rest of Leonardo’s life, he stayed by his side.
To understand Leonardo, it is necessary to understand why he moved away from Florence, this time for good. One reason is simple: he liked Milan better.
Anatomy, Round Two
Leonardo dissect his first body in 1508. He continued with this practice until 1513, and started his second round of anatomical studies.
Leonardo’s anatomy studies were another example of the influence of the printing press.
Leonardo preferred learning from experiment rather than from established authority.
Leonardo theorized by making analogies. His quest for knowledge across all the disciplines of arts and sciences helped him see patterns.
Leonardo began his studies of human muscles, as with most of his scientific work, to serve his art, but he was soon pursuing them out of pure curiosity.
Leonardo was especially interested in how the human brain and nervous system translate emotions into movements of the body.
Leonardo’s studies of the human heart, conducted as part of his overall anatomical and dissection work, were the most sustained and successful of his scientific endeavors.
Leonardo’s breakthroughs on heart valves were followed, however, by a failure: not discovering that the blood in the body circulates.
The World and Its Waters
During the period when he was probing the human body, Leonardo was also studying the body of the earth.
Man is the image of the world, he used to say, relating to microcosm-macrocosm relationship.
He wrote Codex Leicester about water and fluid movements.
Leonardo’s studies of water movements also led him to understand the concept of waves.
He used drawings as tools to help him think.
He concluded that the amount of water on the earth is constant and it is constantly circulating and returning.
He also concluded years before Copernicus, that sun does not move.
Rome
In 1511 Leonardo left Milan again. He went to Rome, looking for new patron – Giovanni de’Medici (Pope Leo X.). Rome was a new place for him. Leonardo was given his living quarters in the Villa Belvedere.
Leonardo’s most intense technology interest while in Rome involved mirrors.
Pointing the Way
During the decade of 1506-16, he wandered between Milan and Rome. During that time, he painted a trio of paintings. One of the paintings was John the Baptist. Second was Angel of the Annuciation. And the third one was Pointing Lady. In all of them Leonardo was using pointing gesture.
The Mona Lisa
He started working on it in 1503 and he didn’t finish it until he died. He was working on it even in 1517.
Vasari was referring to Lisa del Giocondo, who was born in 1479 into a minor branch of the Gherardini family, as Mona Lisa.
There are many portraits, including Leonardo’s earlier La Belle Ferronniere, in which the subject’s eyes appear to move as the viewer moves.
The world’s most famous smile is inherently and fundamentally elusive, and therein lies Leonardo’s ultimate realization about human nature.
Mona Lisa had a lot of copies and derivates. One is The Monna Vanna, one of copies of The Monna Vanna was attributed also to Salai.
France
He accepted the invitation from Francis I. and move to France in the summer of 1516.
King offered to Leonardo to build a palace. But the project was abandoned in 1519, the year Leonardo died.
Leonardo liked to use both words and drawings to depict his ideas.
Leonardo was buried in the church of the Chateau d’Amboise. But the current location of his remains is another mystery.
Conclusion
Leonardo was a genius, one of the few people in history who indisputably deserved – or, to be more precise, earned – that appellation.
“Talent hits a target that no one else can hit,” wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Genius hits target no one else can see.”[1]
Leonardo’s curiosity was his biggest asset. His life offers a wealth of lessons:
- Be curios, relentlessly curious
- Seek knowledge for its own sake
- Retain a childlike sense of wonder
- Observe
- Start with the details
- See things unseen
- Go down rabbit holes
- Get distracted
- Respect facts
- Procrastinate
- Let the perfect be the enemy of the good
- Think visually
- Avoid silos
- Let your reach exceed your grasp
- Indulge fantasy
- Create for yourself, not just for patrons
- Collaborate
- Make lists and be sure to put odd things on them
- Take notes on paper
- Be open to mystery, not anything needs sharp lines
[1] In the book on page 518
